Monthly Archives: March 2018

Market research transcriptions are essential to any qualitative research project. So, it’s only important to provide spotless, or at least workable, audio recordings to whatever general transcription services you’re using for higher quality transcripts. While it’s tricky to record multiple respondent discussions, it is absolutely doable with these easy tips on how to properly record focus groups for transcriptions:

1. Control Background Noise Choose a location that’s free from ambient noises like echoes, indoor, and outdoor noises. It would also help to be mindful of instances when participants themselves make the recording challenging to transcribe, as they form “sub-meetings” or side conversations during the discussion. Low-volume voices or whispers won’t seem like a threat to the recording, but it actually is, especially when many people are talking simultaneously which makes the main dialogue tough to understand. Allot a break time for your respondents to snack and drink when conducting lengthy discussions. Be it just chips, biscuits, or coffee – the sound of wrappers and glasses disrupt the quality of the discussion and audio.

2. Strategize the Position of the Recorder You probably know the size of your focus group beforehand. It is imperative to the quality of the recording to strategize seating arrangements the way the recorder catches everyone’s voices clearly. A small focus group with only 4-6 participants is the ideal volume as they can be closely positioned in a circle, usually with just a coffee table in the middle where the dictaphone is placed. For more than 6 participants, it is highly recommended to utilize boundary microphones evenly positioned on a boardroom table. Remember to be careful when moving your recorder while turned on as well. The sound of the mic being hit or bumped into things drown out people’s voices.

Avoid using mobile phone recorders AT ALL COST, as these are specifically designed for close up recording only. Keep in mind that focus group transcriptions are highly dependent on the quality of your recording, so the type of recorder you use also plays a big role at ensuring high quality audio.

3. Respondent Identification It is difficult to label the names of large-scale focus group respondents, especially if some of them don’t speak up frequently. The voices may sound quite similar in the recording at times too! Get more accurate verbatim transcripts and easily avoid mislabeling by having respondents raise their hands before interjecting so you could call their names clearly for the recording. Avoid just letting them chime in the discussion anytime they want and instead conduct it with utmost coordination. You can also thank them by name after their dialogue to make it even clearer.

Poorly recorded focus groups are less likely to generate quality market research transcripts whether you transcribe it on your own or use any of the most expensive professional transcription services in the market. Get the best bang for the buck by properly recording your focus groups for useful, accurate transcripts perfect for analyzing insights and research findings.

TranscriptionWing offers a high quality verbatim transcription service perfect for getting every bit of information out of focus groups. Learn about our affordable transcription pricing here, or give us a call at +1-203-413-2414 and we’d be delighted to be of assistance!

Transcribing services are heavily utilized by many people and companies across different industries for various reasons – the most common one it being an easy, convenient data management solution especially market research transcriptions, corporate transcriptions, film production transcriptions, and even academic transcription services.

For starters, transcripts are mostly tailored to be direct and reader-friendly. You want to get to the good stuff quickly, so most transcription services usually remove unnecessary content such as false starts, filler words, and unrelated side conversations that clutter the transcript. This is called non-verbatim, which is the standard type of transcript. This refers to clean, easy-to-read transcripts. No paraphrasing is done in order to preserve the speaker’s original thought, just the pure conversion of dialogues into text without the “clutter”.

There are verbatim transcription services that offer formats that can be extremely helpful in court cases or market research transcriptions of interviews and focus groups, making sure that every thought is captured for review and analysis later on. There are also transcription services who cater to clients who want to capture every thought possible but without the unnecessary, meaningless fillers. From this need, we have identified two types of transcriptions that many might find confusing in terms of getting verbatim transcripts (some clients weren’t even aware that this was exactly what they needed!). Make the best of your recordings and identify what suits your needs or project requirements better by familiarizing yourself with these two types of verbatim transcriptions:

1. Smart Verbatim With smart verbatim, every word heard from the audio is captured including false starts and interjections like “oops!” and “shhh!”. Slangs are also typed as is. For instance, “gonna” is not changed to its standard, more formal equivalent “going to”. Other words such as “okey-dokey”, “gotcha”, and “alrighty” are typed exactly the way it’s verbalized. Stutters or repeated words will also be transcribed as said, however, filler utterances such as “uhms” or “ahs” will be omitted.

2. Pure VerbatimLike smart verbatim transcriptions, a pure verbatim transcript contains every word as delivered by the speaker. The only difference is that pure verbatim captures EVERYTHING including utterances also referred to as “non-words” or non-lexical conversational sounds such as eh, ah, uh-huh, uhm, hmm, and uh-hmm – which smart verb omits. Again, EVERYTHING is transcribed strictly as is including untidied grammatical errors, making it a genuine print-copy of your audio.

Examples:

Pure Verbatim

Hmm, yesterday – oh, I think I received the – the, you know, confidentiality agreement the other day and uhm, yeah, sent back the signed copy yesterday.

Smart Verbatim

Yesterday – oh, I think I received the – the, you know, confidentiality agreement the other day and yeah, sent back the signed copy yesterday.

Non-verbatim

I think I received the confidentiality agreement the other day and sent back the signed copy yesterday.

Both pure and smart verbatim transcriptions offer advantages useful for all kinds of needs – especially marketing researchers who extract insight from verbatim transcripts. Words omitted by non-verbatim transcriptions may seem meaningless but these actually denote the speaker’s thinking and emotions like hesitation, excitement, confusion, uncertainty, and frustration which factors to the findings of multitude qualitative studies and/or other purposes. You must therefore keep in mind a very crucial step when looking to get transcriptions done: do you need non-verbatim, smart verbatim, or pure verbatim transcriptions?

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